No. 5: New Glasses, New Hope.

Pregnancy thoughts + the Under $100 Fall Wardrobe guide you've been asking for

A few months into second grade, I came sat at my desk, unpacked my backpack and looked up at the board only to find what was crystal clear only the day before was now a blur. A trip to the eye doctor confirmed my greatest fear: I needed—gasp—glasses.

I settled on a pair of perfectly round Harry Potter-esque pearlescent purple glasses and prayed this whole glasses thing would run its course quickly.

My appointment the following year proved “quickly” wasn’t in the cards. Every few years, I’d sit in that chair guessing at fuzzy “F or B” shapes and each time, my prescription had gotten just the slightest bit worse.

At the same time, I was watching my feet grow at a rate that could rival Lacienega. When I was nine, I wore a size 9. At ten, I wore a size 10. At eleven, I wore an 11 and when I turned 12, I outgrew all my old shoes and had to dig through all the corners of the earth to find size 12 shoes that weren’t orthopedic shoes or plastic heels for drag queens. With my eyesight worse at every appointment and my shoes more enormous at every birthday, I thought to myself, “this is just how things go for me. This is my life.”

I looked at my prescription, gargantuan feet and other health surprises stacking up rapidly and realized they were a metaphor of sorts. My life in my physical body became steadily harder. Weaker. If you we were looking at a graph titled “Ease and Comfort in Jill’s Body” it would just generally trend in the downward direction, you know?